Electronic musical instruments such as synthesizers and the like can generate tones with various kinds of tone colors. For imitating a performance played on a natural musical instrument by an electronic musical instrument, the imitated tone color needs to faithfully imitate the tone color of the natural musical instrument. In addition, the performer needs to understand characteristics peculiar to the musical instrument and perform pieces of music while operating user interfaces of the musical instrument (such as, for example, the keyboard, the pitch-bend lever, the modulation lever, HOLD pedal and the like) during his or her performance. Therefore, when a performer attempts to imitate a performance played on a certain musical instrument, using an electronic musical instrument, the performer needs to have good understanding of the characteristics of the musical instrument to be imitated, and is required to have high-level skills in performance technique to make full use of the user interface according to the characteristics during performance.
For example, in an arpeggio performance technique, which is one of the performance techniques for an acoustic guitar, multiple strings are played and sounded in succession. When the arpeggio performance is imitated by an electronic musical instrument, it is necessary to carry out the performance while stepping on the HOLD pedal to hold tones corresponding to keys that have been released (in other words, the silencing control on the tones is withheld to continue generation of the tones) so that the sounding tones would not be broken. However, when the performance is carried out while stepping on the hold pedal, and when too many sounds are held, for example, when sounds exceeding the number of the strings on a guitar are held, the identity of a guitar arpeggio would be harmed. Accordingly, the performer needs to switch on and off the hold pedal at appropriate timings, which requires high-level performance technique.
Japanese Patent Application No. 3671545, also published as U.S. Pat. No. 5,804,755, pertains to an electronic musical instrument with a fixed number of sound generation channels, and describes a technology pertaining to limiting the number of sound generation channels that can be allocated to resonance sounds, in which, when the number of resonance sounds has already reached the limited number of sound generation channels, one of the sound generation channels allocated to resonance sounds with a lower resonance sound signal level is silenced and released, and the released sound generation channel is allocated to the new resonance sound.